(Via Oxblog): If I actually read The Corner on a regular basis, I would think about boycotting it just for these pro-Wonderbread comments.
Wonderbread is simply not "an often overlooked treat." I have no objection to people who eat it because it's cheap or easily available or useful for blowing one's nose, but this is one of those small areas of taste where there is a right answer.
[Warning. The tone of this post is just a wee bit less judicious than the tone the author usually tries to adopt. He apologizes in advance.]
All right already. I'm a little bit loathe to resurrect the comments war, but here's a recap for the blessedly benighted. Comments are those little links at the bottom of some people's posts (not on this blog) that let a whole bunch of people post their thoughts and responses to each post. Curmudgeonly Clerk has spoken against comments here and here. Begging to Differ has voted against them here. I have ranted against them here (and here(and here)) . Matthew Yglesias has tentatively defended them, and Jivha has done so aggressively, wondering whether anti-commenters were narcissists. Balasubramani's Mania and All The Sins of Mankind are pro-comment as well. CalPundit also threw in a few observations here and here. If you want to get my basic arguments, just read my posts here and here.
Why, you rightly ask, am I dredging up this painful topic? Because I want them to go away. That is, I'm asking bloggers who have comments to please consider getting rid of them. Please. Okay, I'm begging. But why?
I think comments-sections divided into two categories. Those that get a lot of comments, and those that don't. For those that don't get many comments, it seems clear that the benefits and the costs are both pretty slight. But I think that the costs outweigh the benefits. The benefits are close to non-existent. The occasional lonely poster could just as well email the author (who can use his editorial judgment to decide whether to update the post or not), or could post something on his or her own blog. I read a lot of blogs in a day (as do most bloggers, I suspect) and I like to respond to other people's posts, but I get tired of always clicking on the comments scripts to see what other people are saying-- I'd rather the blogger made the editorial decision him or herself. Further, I think comments are just plain un-aesthetic.
For big comments-sections the decision is harder. Some blogs, like Matt Yglesias's have basically developed self-sufficient communities of commenters (not unlike fungal parasites). But these upset me too. When I respond to a post on Yglesias's blog, or Crooked Timber, I don't feel that it's fair for me to post back to the post without reading the comments first. But because the comments are unedited and voluminous, wading through them is a great chore. I'm sure the Crooked Timberites get so much traffic that they don't care much about my links anyway, but there definitely have been posts I just didn't bother to write because the thought of reading 50 stupid comments just in case there were 3 good ones in there was too draining.
And what about the 3 good ones? Well, I've noticed that the most productive and useful comments are almost always from people who also blog, and interestingly, almost always from people whose blogs I already read. So if Jacob Levy hadn't made his comments about Mystique in Yglesias's comments section, I would have seen them anyway when he wrote a blog post about them. And the occasional non-blogger with great insights will probably be willing to send an email to the post's author (or to another blogger) happy enough to post the thing. I think the number of people who are both insightful enough that they have productive things to say (that is, things I want to read) and lazy enough that they wouldn't say them without a comments function is very small.
The whole reason I read Daniel Drezner rather than, say, jack schmo, is that I want to know what Drezner has to say. But then sometimes perfectly reasonable bloggers, like Kevin Drum or Jacob Levy or the Crooked Timber folks, go comment in Drezner's comments so I have to sift through the things for them. Why can't they just write in their own blogs, so that I don't have to wade through dozens of posts to find their insights?
I'm thinking back to J.H.Huebert's inaugural blog post, where he replied that blogs were nothing more than message boards. I disagreed:
Blogging brings the masses to the "message boards" precisely because it provides an easy way to filter out the wheat from the chaff (namely by typing in "http://volokh.com"). Sure the vast majority of blogs are dumb, but you don't have to read the vast majority of blogs. The trouble with old message boards is that it's WAYY too hard to read only the popular posts, or only the good posts, or even focus only on the posts by authors you truly respect. Blogs are better precisely because thread-following is made so much harder. Editorial judgment, ironically, is the watchword that helps keep the marketplace of ideas from drowning in its own spam.
Incidentally, a version of this argument is part of the root of my opposition to "comments".
Kathleen Moriarty blogs on memorization. Kathleen's basic question--
Memorisation of poetry is something that sort of went out with the druids. In our written world, is memorisation still necessary?
Maybe. For poetry, I think it can be easier to say it from memory rather than reading it. It makes it easier to ge tthe rhythm right when you don't have to think about saying it. "This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper." doesn't work when you read it.
On the other hand, memorisation also encourages the sort of rote reading that you hear so often, people droning on about poems that don't understand. Sometimes reading the poem makes the reader think about it a little more.
Cryptic Elliptic Susan Ferrari has ditched her comments. A small victory for the forces of good and light.
I've just finished Darlington's Fall (mentioned below), and I thought it was extremely good-- though I can't quite decide to classify it as one of my favorite poems or one of my favorite books, because I can't quite tell whether I like it more for its language or its story. In any case, as usual a bunch of my favorite quotes from the book are here (including the last stanza, which I think is excellent, but which I won't reprint here for fear of spoiling the book for any of you who might be thinking of reading it). A few choice (non-consecutive) stanzas ensue:
(You know you're a true entomologist
If--if on those infrequent but
Not-rare-either occasions when your fingers climb
Down past the sealed door of your navel to form a fist
Around their brother-limb, you find yourself wondering
Sudenly, with dizzying fervor, exactly what
It would be like, like the dragonfly,
To mate and-- over riffled streams, over thundering
Flumes, over lily-pad-paved ponds, over high
Seas of silky corn-- to fly at the same time.)
When he can bear to think of her at all, he'd rather
Think of what he likes to think of
As the last time the two of them made love:
A pair of kids, nothing more, just a you and a me
(As the song would have it), a he and a she,
Rolling at night in a private sleeper car,
Bound for that ocean licking at the far
End of the continent (through woods where Kodiak bears
Waken to train whistles in their hillside lairs),
Two homesteaders in the land of each other.
(You know you're a true entomologist
If-- if after some thirty, dirty years
Of digging into buggy lives, one day, rereading
Fabre, you come upon the phrase, "Still damp
With the humours of the hatching," and your every limb
Prickles anew, with longing, as when, when you were just
A little boy, you read, in The Three Musketeers,
"Milady let one of those looks fall upon him
Which make a slave of a king"--and yearned for the stamp
Of a glance so brutal, beautiful, overriding.)
(He often thinks-- can't quite manage to refrain
From thinking-- of all the coarse desire she must stir,
How raptly the males in town must lay eyes on her
During her daily rounds: buying a pork cop,
Or a few onions, or--indulging herself-- a day-
Old cinnamon bun . . . It's the closest he comes to a real
Hatred of his fellowman,
pondering the way
She rouses in them the longings she makes him feel:
The urge to touch her neck, drop his face on her breast, drop
Her clothes to the floor, one by one till none remain.)
Venkat Balasubramani poses an interesting question for those of us (like me!) hotly interested in the intersection of blogging and etiquette. How private are emails, especially emails to bloggers? (Go to Balasubramani's blog for the controversy that sparks the original question). As my loyal readers might expect, I turn to Miss Manners for guidance on this.
As it happens, I think the blogospheric consensus gets this about right. On the one hand, Miss Manners rightly instructs that letters (and affairs) are the joint property of the two people engaged in them. Therefore to be strictly proper, one shouldn't reveal the contents without the consent of the other person involved. On the other hand, Miss Manners acknowledges that the publication of this kind of information is a distinct possibility, that it isn't a very serious offense, and that one should therefore be a little circumspect in who one says what to. As she puts it:
The only safe place to keep damaging letters is in the fireplace, between burning logs
People who unburden themselves freely cannot then become indignant when others allow this information to pass into their own conversation. With each passing, the obligations become weaker. At the very least, one should assume that one's confidants indulge in pillow talk, and these days it is hard to know how many pillows may be involved.
Though the permalinks are broken, Southern Appeal has up excerpts from a recent speech by Alabama Attorney General and Filibustered Appellate Court Nominee William Pryor.
Now, I disagree with pretty much everything in the speech myself-- I don't "consider the Ten Commandments to be the cornerstone of law for Western civilization," (only three of which, at my last quick count, were currently illegal where I live). I don't believe I have "'a moral obligation to obey the commands of our government,' except when doing so would require us to 'violate a Christian duty or moral obligation.'" [I don't, for example, think it's immoral to smoke marijuana for one's own pleasure in the privacy of one's own home, but I also don't think it's a moral obligation or Christian duty to do so.] Of course, I also don't share the religious conviction that undergirds Pryor's speech. Nonetheless, it's interesting stuff, and an interesting insight, I think, into Pryor. Worth reading.
Incidentally, I apologize for the slower-than-usual posting rate the past couple of days. I've been reading a book I just ordered off of Amazon-- no, I haven't gotten a pre-release copy of Quicksilver-- called Darlington's Fall.
It's really really good, but it's a little strange. I mean, how do you tell people (with a straight face) that you're reading this fascinating verse novel about a young lepidopterist in Indiana? I haven't found a way to do it without sounding really pretentious, which is unfortunate because the novel/poem is actually quite a smooth read. The author is my current obsession, Brad Leithauser (who John Updike regularly compares to that other lepidoterist's literary hero-- Vladimir Nabokov). Leithauser says in the introduction:
It's long, I know, for a poem (5,708 lines) but short for a novel (46,265 words, my computer tells me), and a novel's what I aimed to create here. I looked for dailiness and rootedness-- for verse with the firm calendars and solid place names, the ingrained habits and the incremental persuasions and erosions, which the novel has typically found congenial. I wanted specificity. Although all characters within these pages-- including the narrator-- are fictions, in nearly every case I've tried to get the science right. If the people are fabricated, I'd like to think the insects are genuine.)
A word about method, for those interested in verse mechanics. Having permitted myself rhymes that fall catch-as-catch-can, I vowed that nearly every line would have an exact, or perfect, rhyme. I 've eagerly made exceptions, though, for those irregular rhymes I often prefer to "perfection": especially rime riche (prays/praise) and pararhymes or rim rhymes (please/applause)...
Hands are hungry and with hungry hands
You must work extra hard to keep
Your wits about you, to be slow and quick
At once, as the situation demands.
(When you're so full of wanting, it's no small trick.)
Boil down all the trees in the forest until
They form a single cup of resin, still
You would never concoct a green
So bright, so dark, so dizzyingly deep
As this, the purest color he has ever seen
The online interviewing fad continues. Another Rice Grad has an interview with the CEO of Trupoker.com. Definitely worth reading for anybody interested in the game. (Incidentally for interviews with famous bloggers look to the 20 Questions sidebar on the right. For links to Howard Bashman's interviews with various judges, click here. Also, don't miss Kevin Drum's Paul Krugman interview.)
So a few weeks ago, Dear Prudence egregiously suggested that wedding hosts could demand money from their guests. This is wrong, not only because wedding hosts shouldn't be asking for gifts (of any sort) from their guests (presents are supposed to be "emotionally motivated") but also because wedding hosts shouldn't be presuming the existence of these gifts at all. Luckily, Prudie recognized the error of her ways and issued a retraction.
Sadly, Prudie has received a rather sickening firestorm of counter-retraction email from her readers, all of whom strongly believe that it's okay to ask for cash in one's wedding invitation. As I've said before, it's not. It's just not.
[This is not to say that just giving cash is impermissible. Like so many things in polite society, it's perfectly acceptable to give freely, just gauche to ask for it.]
Open call to readers. What drug policy blogs do you know about, or bloggers who blog about drug policy a decent fraction of the time? Please send me anything you can think of.
P.S. . . Keep your eyes peeled for an exciting entry into the blogosphere. That's all I can say for now.
From Judge Alex Kozinski's opinion in United States v. Bonas:
(T)his is not a Harry Potter novel; there is no charm for making a defendant’s constitutional rights disappear.
A few interesting thoughts about sex (based on a movie I haven't seen-- The Man From Elysian Fields)from Alina Stefanecu:
the charm of a one-night-stand or purely physical sex lies in its unintelligibility. We overestimate the extent to which ascribing meaning to all human interactions is a positive good. Some things are best left devoid of meaning. Perhaps this is because meaning adds aftertaste, or provokes nostalgia. There are moments and phases and moons in which the best memory is not inscribed on the skin as deeply as a scratch or scar; only lightly outlined. Love is the language by which we make sense of sex-- the grammar which turns nuance into shades of the describable. Maybe sex is better left unsaid or unread at times.
I troll pretty regularly (i.e., obsessively) using sitemeter and technorati to keep track of other blogs or websites that link to this site, but each of these sources is unreliable in its own way. If you write a post linking to any of my posts (or any of my co-bloggers' posts) and have the time to drop me an email letting me know, please do.
Much as I sympathize with Half The Sins of Mankind about the virtues of "Y'all" (a logism that's been creeping into my speech despite being born, raised, and educated in the midwest), I have to quarrel with two points in her latest post:
1: "Y'all" is a brilliant solution to the problem of the English language's loss of a second-person plural. Spanish has ustedes; French has vous; American English has y'all.
2: [On "You guys"]: Also, one should not address a mixed-sex group with a word that is solely for males.
Incidentally, it's about time somebody combined A.O.Scott (Bill Murray's Art of Losing) with Elizabeth Bishop (One Art, below):
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Rdany Btreant is aezamd. Kaiern Haley is mcuh mroe stackipel. Check it out.
Warning. I'm about to link to Clayton Cramer's weblog.
Clayton Cramer has an interesting post about somebody he knew once who decided to boycott the carrying of 20 dollar bills. I wonder if I could find a way to manage doing the same. (Andrew Jackson, for those who don't know, is my personal pick for most evil American president in history, though he does have some stiff competition.)
Starting next month I won't be carrying American currency very much for about a year, so I guess that would be a start. And this might well be too much trouble to be worth the effort. But I do think it's a nice symbolic gesture and the sort of eccentric motion of principle I generally admire in other people.
"Using simple linear regression, we find that about half of the variation in Quality is a function of Easiness and Sexiness."
And here's the context.
If, like most of the rest of us, you didn't feel like slogging through the 66-page decision from the 9th circuit today that enjoined the California recall (previous post here), you probably missed a rather entertaining paragraph about how Democracy in Iraq affects the election for governor in California:
In addition to the public interest factors we have discussed, we would be remiss if we did not observe that this is a critical time in our nation’s history when we are attempting to persuade the people of other nations of the value of free and open elections. Thus, we are especially mindful of the need to demonstrate our commitment to elections held fairly, free of chaos, with each citizen assured that his or her vote will be counted, and with each vote entitled to equal weight. A short postponement of the election will accomplish those aims and reinforce our national commitment to democracy.
In the wake of this weekend's Republican convention, newspapers are rife with speculation on whether or not Tom McClintock will step down to clear the field for Arnold.
However, despite the fact that McClintock's withdrawal would probably ensure a republican victory, such a move is, I think, highly unlikely. For the conservative core of the Republican party--the Bible-thumping moralists who never met a tax cut they didn't like--Swarzenegger would literally be no better than a democrat. Not only is he unacceptably liberal on the hot-button issues such as abortion, gay rights, and gun control, he hasn't even promised not to raise taxes. For the Republican party to force out McClintock to clear the way for Swarzenegger would alienate their most faithful, committed, and energetic members. At that price, I suspect that the party hierarchy will find the governer's mansion too dear.
Of course, all of this sort of speculation may become irrelevant, as the ninth circuit has approved an injunction to delay the recall election.
Eric Muller wishes that Instapundit hadn't posted a picture of the WTC "Jumper" leaping to his death (other posts here and here). Mulller was rather upset and shaken by seeing the picture, and now he's swearing off of Instapundit, at least for a while. Interestingly, he's taken an incredibly quantity of flak from his commenters over this, much of which has devolved into pretty un-helpful argument. All right.
I'm posting about this because I, too, posted the Jumper picture. In fact, I had the Jumper picture on my wall for over a year when I was living in the dorms, and now that I think about it I do think it made some people pretty uncomfortable. Now, I don't want to join the firestorm of silly people lambasting Mr. Muller for being disturbed by the image-- his post has nothing to do with his feelings about 9/11, his machismo, or his moral worth, at least, nothing that I can discern. But I also don't agree that Instapundit's original decision was an error in editorial judgment. Muller writes:
What I said was that Glenn Reynolds made an error in editorial judgment when he chose to put a photograph of a WTC jumper atop his enormously popular and widely read blog "Instapundit." I said that some people have worked to avoid exposure to those photos, and that as unsuspecting Instapundit readers who are familiar with its ordinary tone and content, these people could not reasonably expect to have this graphic image greet them when they click their way to his site. I think that's a big mistake in editorial judgment for a widely read, general-interest blog like Instapundit.
What word in the singular refers to a collection of people as a whole, but in the plural refers to the individuals within a group?
The Answer.
(Via my sister)
Can somebody please explain this?:
The increasingly bitter tone of the Ontario campaign took a surreal turn Friday when a press release from the Tory election machine labelled Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty a pet-eating alien.
The bizarre insult, contained in a statement e-mailed to media representatives shortly before lunchtime, immediately deflected attention from the health-care agenda that the Conservatives had hoped to pitch Friday.
"Dalton McGuinty," the statement said. "He's an evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet."
...with a to-be-continued post on the analogies between aesthetic argument and political argument.
To illustrate why thinking about politics in line with the ways we think about art makes sense, let me offer a parable.
A man and a woman sit down to argue. They argue first about American television in the late 1970s. The man begins with his assertions. Taxi? Overrated. All in the Family? Groundbreaking. Charlie's Angels? The beginning of the end.
The woman disagrees.... (read more)
The Ninth Circuit has delayed California's Recall Vote. Summary here. Ruling here. Links via the inimitable Howard Bashman.
UPDATE: Rick Hasen has thoughts here.
Ampersand is still on the record-label case. Much to my relief, he now seems to be writing that a lot of what's wrong with my opinion of the record industry is what's wrong with libertarianism generally. This is good because here I'm on much surer ground. If all that Ampersand is complaining about is that some people have access to a very very valuable service (the ability to reach and sway public opinion) and they are using this very valuable service to exact huge fees from people so desperate for the service that they're willing to pay for them using largely consensual contracts, I'm not unhappy with that at all.
What I want to underscore is that when somebody comes along and tells you that a current system of bargaining is "unfair" but that the explanation for this unfairness isn't some sort of natural monopoly, or the coercive use of force, you should be skeptical. I have no doubt that a lot of artists get a lot more screwed by the current system that Ampersand would like them to be. I happen to be skeptical that making copyright untransferrable (which seems to be what Amp wants) will help artists on the whole more than it will hurt them. And I'm really skeptical that it will help the music industry more than it will hurt it.
If it's expensive, difficult, and valuable for record companies to do what they do-- take gambles on new bands (most of whom suck), push the ones with half a shot at popularity and make stars out of nothing-- then I don't see what's wrong with bands paying an arm, a leg, or their eternal souls for the privilege. And if what record companies do is largely value-less pencil pushing, then, as I wrote earlier, I think it's time for somebody like me to break into the business and offer the low-cost alternative. I suppose one view of things is that the record labels have established a lot of popularity and now the entry costs for new firms is very great, creating a monopoly pressure. But given the number of new record labels, of successful indie bands, and the ease with which one can create and distribute music using the internet, I'm not convinced that's the situation, or that Ampersand would be happier if ten more record companies entered the fray to join in the exploitation.
But in general I'm really happy that our disagreement has now boiled down to "what so many libertarians seem incapable of understanding - in the real world, contracts are negotiated from very unequal positions, in which the party with the power sets the terms," because I do understand this. I even agree with this. When two sides enter a contract with unequal positions, the stronger party gets a better deal on the contract. But it's not at all clear why this is a bad thing. When I go out to buy mechanical pencils, I'm in a very weak bargaining position. Bis has a bajillion pencils to sell, and if I don't like their terms, well they'll sell them to somebody else. Of course, if Bic's prices were too high, I'd go buy them from another pencil manufacturer. Similarly for college tuition. I may not like the fact that the University of Chicago costs tens of thousands of dollars per year, but we're negotiating from very unequal positions, and the reason for that is that our unequal positions are caused by the fact that one of us is bringing far more irreplaceable services to the table. Either record companies offer a replaceable service, in which case Baude Records starts in a few years to replace them, or record companies offer a largely irreplaceable service of marketing, coordination, and all the rest. But note again that plenty of artists produce their own music and avoid the major record companies. Most of them don't do so well, which might be a sign here that people who pay the record company are getting something for the money. Amp is just upset because the people making most of the money off of this are the rich fat-cats rather than the starving artists, whereas I don't care who makes money off of this so long as they play fair. And I don't think it's unfair to bargain hard from a position of strength.
Incidentally, what of the notion that bands are doomed because the record company can always sign with another band while the band can never go sign with another record company. First off, this is a reason that signing a "Deal memo" (who's contractual status I'm still skeptical about, incidentally) is a bad idea, no matter how desperate the band is. And this will be one of the offerings of Baude Records; we'll sign contracts without deal memos. Bands will flock. Secondly, not all bands are replaceable. Sure a beginning band probably is, and might well have to sign away their copyright, royalties, and immortal soul to be able to get a great deal and become the next sensation to sweep the nation. But so long as they didn't sign away the copyright to their second album (and even if they did, there are ways around that), then they've got the bargaining capital to make a second cd, and they can get money off of this one.
It's not a great arrangement, but it's the same as the one a lot of business face-- lose money for the first while, getting your name out there, building up a customer base, then come in and reap the rewards. It's also similar to the arrangement a lot of people who pay income tax face. If one's success is dependent on the valuable services of various people, it doesn't bother me tremendously when those people negotiate their own terms. And the more popular a band is, the more bargaining power it has. This explains why, contrary to the doomsayer view, a lot of rock stars are in fact millionaires, some even from CD sales.
Incidentally, Amp claims that
There are a very limited number of labels who can provide access to a national audience (radio play, nationwide distribution of CDs, etc). There is a virtually unlimited number of young bands full of members who are sick of flipping burgers for a living and who are starving for a chance to reach a nationwide audience. Simple supply and demand would suggest that bands will be willing to accept very lousy terms indeed.
One of my favorite bumper stickers is one that I picked up years ago at a gaming convention in Milwaukee. It says "If guns are outlawed, can we use swords?" I guess I shouldn't have asked.
Are you going to be in Chicago, Columbus, Auburn Hills, St. Paul, San Jose, Anaheim, or Los Angeles in the next few months? (curses, I'm not!) Then go see Simon and Garfunkel.
And somehow I'm reminded of my sister's comment on Beowulf:
The poem--which seems just indiscriminately ancient to us--is written by a Christian poet about a pre-Christian world--and it's about a hero whose last, great fight is one he's too old for--so the theme of returning, of dipping in the same river twice, is at least two layers deep.
Incidentally, not all bloggers think highly of the Begging to Differ Sunday Comics. J.H. Huebert pronounces them "just as unfunny as the ones in your local paper".
Jeremy Reff is posting again at Refference after a 3.5 month hiatus. He reaffirms that:
Ada is still the best book ever written by an American. Communism was still the worst idea ever. My mom's chocolate chip cookies are still the best in the world. My two sets of roomies are still awesome.
Why is it that I'm more surprised to hear that people believe in Ann Coulter than to hear that they believe in Santa Claus?
"Arafat can no longer be a factor in what happens here," the vice prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told the Israel radio. "The question is: How are we going to do it? Expulsion is certainly one of the options, and killing is also one of the options."
Dave Kaiser has some thoughts on the presidential election that's coming in 14 months and its connection to the war on terrorism. Namely, he believes (surprise, surprise) that "as long as Americans are concerned about terrorism, the Democrats have no chance of winning the Presidency or Congress." Color me unconvinced.
Long-time blog readers know I'm no strong ally of either established party, and that my posts take aim at the left at least as often as at the right. But I'm simply not convinced that terrorism will be a dramatically losing issue for the democrats. Kaiser's evidence amounts mostly to an essay in The Nation, Ed Koch's assertion that Howard Dean is McGovern 2, and a few other things.
I'm not saying these are wholly irrelevent, but they seem to ignore points that the Democrats could capitalize on in a campaign-- namely, that George W. Bush's anti-terror activities still haven't captured Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein (if, as Kaiser says, Bin Laden is still "blowing up stuff", mightn't that hurt Bush's claim to be tough on terrorism?), and that he's thus far managed to botch the Iraqi reconstruction fairly severely. Sure, folks like Jonathan Schell say it doesn't matter because we shouldn't have been in Iraq to begin with, but Jonathan Schell isn't running for president, and neither (really) is Dennis Kucinich.
Folks who talk about a "post-9/11 world" are generally long on rhetoric but short on actual facts. Is it really true that the Democrats are out there pretending domestic issues are all that matter, while the Republicans are adopting a new, post-9/11 strategy? (Can you say "tax cuts"? What about "steel tariffs"?)
Now, yes, President Bush is a relatively popular wartime president, and I don't mean to say I'll think he'll lose; I do think he's got the statistical edge against any challenger. And, yes, the last popular wartime President Bush only lost the election because of the economy; but that doesn't mean this Bush couldn't lost it on account of the war. Furthermore, if Howard Dean can, he should draft Wesley Clark as vice-president. It wouldn't be impossible for Bush (whose military experience largely consisted of not-serving on the National Guard) to cast himself as having better wartime experience, but it wouldn't be easy either.
Heck, if I were in charge of Dean's cabinet, I would combine VP Clark with Secretary of Defense John McCain and Secretary of State Richard Lugar. The former is the perennial thorn-in-the-Republicans'-side who probably couldn't be convinced to desert the party, but now that BCRA is passed (and probably safe from the Supremes), who knows? The latter, of course, is a not-terrifically-pro-war Republican Senator endowed with incredible resources of integrity and intelligence, who would probably make a better SoS than even Colin Powell. Of course, I'm not in charge of Dean's cabinet, (must to the relief of all of my leftist friends, I'm sure) so this isn't going to happen, but I mention it only to remind people too quick to latch onto the tried-and-true formulations that the political war on terror isn't necessarily a dead bargain.
I care a great deal about making sure terrorists don't blow me up, but I'd feel a lot better about things if I was convinced that the current administration were making me significantly safer than another administration would be. I'm not saying that won't happen in the next year or so, but they have a way to go.
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A little poker arithmetic: Suppose that three players are playing a game of Texas Hold'em (two cards are dealt to each player, they bet, then five community cards are gradually dealt. Players make the best five card hand). Suppose also that after a series of bets and reraises, all three of them end up going all-in. Now suppose that when they lay down their hands that one player has two Kings (K-K) one has two Queens (Q-Q) and the third player has an Ace and a Jack, unsuited (A-J). Who's the favorite and by how much?
If you said that K-K has a lead, you're right. In fact, my very-back-of-the-envelope calculations show the probabilities of winning to be about 65% for K-K, 16% for Q-Q and 19% for A-J. Why?
[Incidentally, if wants to run this hand through a monte-carlo simulation on their computer, please email me the results.] Let's ignore a lot of the truly unusual hands that could flop (four of a kinds for the K and Q, or a triple on the A or the J, and also the flushes and straights). Then note that the chance of a K or a Q being in one of the next five cards is about 20% each. (This is 1 - (44/46 x 43/45 x 42/44 x 41/43 x 40/42)). The chance of an A being in one of those five cards is about 30%, and all of these events are more-or-less independence. [sheesh. how many sloppy approximations are you going to make?-- ed. plenty.]
If we ignore all of the rare funny-business (which I suspect won't too much affect the final outcome) then the Kings win whenver a K flips, which happens 20% of the time. The Kings also win whenever nothing at all flips, which happens (.8 x .8 x .7 =) 45% of the time. The A-J, meanwhile wins whenever an Ace flips if no Q or K arrives. This happens (.3 x .8 x .8) = 19% of the time, and the poor Q-Q win only when a Queen comes but a King does not, (.8 x .2 =) 16% of the time. Now, I suspect the actual percentages give the A-J a little more of an edge than I have here (since that extra "funny-business" is disproportionately likely to help the A-J, and I can't remember the suits of the cards which determines what would happen with the possible flush draws). But I suspect these percentages are pretty close to accurate. Which makes us wonder-- what the hell was the Q-Q doing in there?
Incidentally, the Queens (played by me) won, through no fault of their owner's playing skill. The five communal cards held a Q and an A, but no K. Now back to your regularly scheduled blogging.
UPDATE: Thanks to Another Rice Grad I see that I did indeed give the A-J undeservedly short shrift. Using my best recollection of the suits, the probabilities were 58% for the KK, 18% for the QQ and 24% for the AJ.